I hope you’re having a great week! It looks like Amazon has started to tier sellers back up this week, and the daily upload limit is now back to normal! This week, I’m going to go over the importance of Merch by Amazon t-shirt reviews.

Have you ever wondered how to quickly check if any of your t-shirts have any reviews?

Of course you have. Everyone wants to know what buyers think of their designs. Even though we can’t contact the customer to request a review, it’s still important to check your designs from time to time to see if any feedback has been left for them.

Understanding Product Reviews

We all know how important product reviews are. Whenever a customer receives one of your shirts, they have the option to leave a review for your design. Merch shirts are no different than any other Amazon product. Sometimes these reviews are positive, and sometimes they are negative. But sometimes, customers leave reviews that are unjustified or out of your control, and you might need to contact Amazon for answers.

If you don’t take a look every once in a while, you may never know why sales tanked for a particular design. Product reviews can make or break your design. One bad review can shape the future of that design forever.

I did want to point out – and this is very important, BSR is not affected by reviews or ratings. However both play a big role when it comes to customer buying decisions.

Take a look at these two scenarios:

Scenario #1: The Positive Review

Mark goes to Amazon.com and types in “Winter Survivalist t-shirts”. Amazon’s autocomplete feature kicks in, and shows a dropdown menu that would displays results he’s looking for in the ‘Novelty & More’ section, which is where all of our Merch shirts are uploaded to.

So, Mark click that dropdown, and Amazon shows him all the t-shirts with these keywords in them.

Mark see 6 results. 5 of those 6 shirts don’t have reviews. But, 1 design has a 5-star review.

Naturally, Marks click into the shirt with the 5-star first, reads the review, and begins to formulate a decision already. Mark has no idea that all 6 shirts are being printed, packed, and shipped from the exact same Amazon warehouse.

Marks entire buying decision comes down to choosing the shirt with a positive review, or choosing a shirt that is unknown.

Maybe the design with 5-star rating has only sold once, and the seller was lucky enough to get a review on it. The other 5 could still be much better designs, but still, Mark decides to trust the reviewer instead.

Scenario #2: The Negative Review

Let’s take Mark through the buying experience one more time. This time Mark sees 6 shirts, 5 of them have no reviews, and one of them has a 3-star review.

When Mark see’s 6 designs, and one has a 3-star review – his first reaction is curiosity.

Why was that shirt only given a 3-star review? Did the design fade? Did it smell like vinegar? Was it too small?

If Mark is a smart buyer, (which he probably is – because let’s face it, we all make buying decisions based on ratings these days), he clicks the design with a 3-star review and reads the review.

In his mind though, Marks already made the decision not to buy that shirt. He was just looking for confirmation as to why he should not to purchase it.

Mark trusts other customers’ ratings – whether good or bad.

Check Your T-Shirt Listings Regularly

That’s really all there is to it. Just keep an eye on them to see what other people think.

We are simply the artists for Amazon. We have no control over our designs once they go live. We have no way of contacting customers and asking them politely to review our designs.

And that’s okay. Leave that to Amazon to worry about. We have other things to focus on like pumping out quality designs. If you make good designs to begin with, these positive reviews should come naturally.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never reviewed a t-shirt in my entire life. I review a lot of things, but never a t-shirt. I have no idea why.

To date, I have 63 designs live, I’ve sold over 300 shirts, and I have gotten…wait for it….

1 review.

That’s it. Over the last 5 months that I’ve been selling on Merch by Amazon, I’ve only gotten one t-shirt review. It just happened to be a 5-star review luckily.

All the review says is, “The way I wanted it….”. But here’s the funny thing; that 1 review has skyrocketed sales for me.

This design used to sell maybe once or twice a week for me, and it’s now my best-selling shirt. This one design sells at least once a day now. It’s not even that great of a design in my opinion.

The even funnier part is this shirt was the first design I ever uploaded to Merch.

It holds a special place in my heart…

I mean inventory.

Do I Have To Check Designs One-By-One?

Nope!

I mean you certainly can, but depending on how many shirts you have live that could take a really long time.

Most of you already use Chrome, so really all you need to do is download this free extension.

What’s LinkClump?

Linkclump is a browser extension that allows you to open multiple links at the same time. Super easy to use, and it’ll save you a ton of time.

Here’s how to use it for Merch by Amazon:

Log into your Merch account

Click Manage, and change the filter to LIVE

Scroll to the bottom and change the dropdown to 100 results per page.

Scroll back to the top of your designs.

Right click and hold, and drag all the way to the bottom.

100 is the maximum number of items that we can see per page in our Merch account. If you have more than 100 items, you’ll have to do this for each page.

Linkclump will then open 100 browser tabs, with each of your shirts appearing in a new tab.

It’ll take a minute or two to open all of your designs in a new tab, but what’s 1-2 minutes when you’d spend that much time on just a couple tshirts?

Awesome! Now what do I do?

Now that each of your designs are opened up in a new tab, start working your way through the tabs. If a shirt doesn’t have any reviews, close the tab and move on to the next one.

If it has a positive review – great! Make a mental note of that design and see if you notice an uptick in sales.

If it has a negative review, pin that tab to the top of your browser (right-click the tab, & click Pin Tab. This keep the tab open even if you close your browser down. Think of it like ‘pinning’ your most-used programs to your Windows Taskbar).

We’re not going to worry about this negative review just yet, but we do want to review it later.

I find it’s more efficient to do things in batches. Rather than addressing that 1 negative review now, ou should go through all of your designs first. You may only have 1 negative review to look into. You may have 10.

If you have 10 bad reviews, you can compare the reviews and see if they have a common theme.

“Reviewing” Your Reviews

If you do have any bad reviews, you have a decision to make. Do you keep the design live, or take it down? Is it something that can easily be fixed? Was it Amazon’s fault?

If the review says crooked or off center – that’s something you can fix. Just open it up in Photoshop and make the necessary adjustments.

If the buyers say anything about the shipping times, vinegar smell from the printer, wrong size, etc – you might wanna contact Amazon to see if they can remove that review. Remember; bad reviews will affect future sales from a customer standpoint.

If Amazon doesn’t end up responding in a timely manner or taking care of the issue for you, you can always remove the design and re-upload it. You will lose all BSR and sales associated with that design, so keep that in mind as well.

However, if you are still making sales, or you just have 1 bad review but a lot of positive reviews, you might be better off just leaving the review. Especially if that quote/niche now has a lot of competitors. A few sales every now and then is better than losing all sales for the design.

That’s just a decision you have to make.

Finishing Up

You definitely don’t have to make review-checking a part of your daily or weekly routine, but it’s good to at least check from time to time.

Double down on those best-selling designs that have reviews, and you could easily end up with a lot more monthly sales.

That’s about it for this post! If you’d like to be emailed the next time I create a blog post, add your email here!

As always, best of luck on your Merch journey! Don’t forget to check out my Resources page for the list of tools I use.